Former General Motors top car designer talks about car design
Dick Luzin, former chief designer of Chevrolet and Cadillac at General Motors, shares his thoughts on automotive design.
Editor’s note: This week we visited the My Favorite Ride archives for this classic column from May 2017.
This kind of thing happens sometimes.
I was driving around the west side of Bloomington, Indiana the other day and stopped at Dollar General to buy a mop and a bottle of Mr. Clean. Don’t ask. And as I was leaving the parking lot, I saw a Cadillac hearse outside Little Blue Tattoo.
I stop, park, and go inside. Tattoo artist Brant Daly stands behind the counter. He looks at me warily. Don’t I look like I’m about to get a tattoo?
“Is that your hearse parked out front?”
“yes.”
“Well, that’s great.”
After we started talking about my story, where I work for a newspaper and write a quirky weekly column called “My Favorite Ride” about people and their cars, he agreed to take pictures and talk. It’s not every day you come across a rusting, 44-year-old car whose purpose was to transport the deceased to the morgue for autopsy or to their final resting place.
Recently, old hearses have been converted into campers. “Yeah, me and my girlfriend were camping there,” Daly says. “It’s not like people died in the ambulance or anything like that.”
For decades, Miller Meteor has equipped Cadillac chassis like his with a hearse funeral vehicle package with all-around windows, a tall canopied rear section, and a mechanized system with rollers to move the casket in and out of the side-opening rear door. Two seats for rear passengers fold down below the area where the coffin will be placed.
Checking the Internet, I found a sleek black 1973 Fleetwood Hearse with 88,500 miles and just a little rust for sale in Burbank, California. If they traveled this distance, they obviously carried many bodies. No price was listed, but it comes with the largest car cover I’ve ever seen. By the way, the 1973 Cadillac Fleetwood is over 19 feet long. Two years later, the 1975 Fleetwood became the longest car ever produced, measuring 21 feet from nose to taillights.
Daley saw his 1970s olive green hearse listed for sale on Craigslist five or six months ago, but declined to say how much he paid for it. “It was kind of weird,” he said, and called Bedford for a closer look. “This guy’s brother had died of cancer, and he had a lot of old cars that he was selling.”
The old Cadillac worked fine, but needed some mechanical work. “We had valve rust and other issues,” Daly said. He’s glad he has an auto mechanic friend who is willing to do inside work in exchange for a tattoo.
The odometer hasn’t worked in years, so the total number of miles the car has covered is a mystery. And fuel economy isn’t very good. “It has a 27-gallon fuel tank,” he said, but since the gas gauge is broken, he has no idea how much fuel it has. “I know it takes 13 gallons to drive from Bloomington to Muncie.” I did the math. Divide the 112 miles to Muncie by 13 and you get about 8.5 mpg.
The ride is smooth. “It’s comfortable. You can drive the car with just one finger on the steering wheel,” he said. He likes the rusty, rusty look. “I think we’ll have to patch up the actual holes, but I like the rest of it,” he said.
Daley found some interesting items inside the old car, including a receipt from when a body was transported from O’Hare International Airport to a funeral home in Louisville several years ago. “They said it was for the removal of bodies,” he said.
Want to talk about cars and trucks? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.
